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We’ve just spent two weeks at La Mariposa Hotel and Spanish School. We stayed in the cabin at La Reserva where a beautiful garden has grown since our visit last year.
Jan studied Spanish for 2 weeks, 4 hours a day. Alan managed the first week and then became a volunteer, gardening and helping a local young man practice his English. In the afternoons we joined in some of the activities with other students and volunteers. We visited the beautiful Laguna de Apoyo, went to the Pacific beach and took a couple of outings to the colonial city of Granada including a boat trip round the islands on the lake. We visited the majestic Volcán Masaya at night to see the red glow from the slowly moving magma – it really was like gazing into the centre of the earth!One evening a Mariachi band came to play.
We also found time to relax and set the world to rights with our friend Paulette in her beautiful garden.
La Mariposa and it’s projects are a great example of sustainable tourism at it’s very best.
There’s a lot more interesting information on the website http://mariposaspanishschool.com

At it’s various locations La Mariposa is home to a wide range of rescued animals including two white rabbits, 23 retired horses, over 50 dogs and more than 20 cats. A group of capuchin monkeys, victims of illegal trafficking, were brought in by the Police. There’s also a toucan, parakeets and other assorted birds mostly rescued from a life imprisoned in a small cage or on a chain.
Many of these, including the capuchins and toucan have spent too long in captivity to survive in the wild and La Mariposa will be their lifetime home.
For others release back into the wild is a possibility and we were privileged to witness the opening of a cage to free a group of six parakeets. They seemed reluctant to leave at first! The following week a second group’s cage had be demolished around them.
Two spider monkeys who had lived chained as pets have been purchased from their previous owners and now live in the trees at the 140 acre Cañada Honda site bought to protect the wooded area from deforestation. Currently they are on long leads, have made friends and, in the near future, will be released one at a time to enjoy roaming in their splendid natural home. We were there on the day they were introduced.

Now we’ve moved on to visit our friends in Esteli but we’ll be back soon for our final week.